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[PS3] - YLOD

Eventually it happened. Yesterday, the PS3 switched off by itself, and the light was blinking yellow. I tried a few times to restart, but it didn't stay on for more than 30 seconds. Google says it's the "Yellow Light Of Death", and it's due to overheating. Apparently the console can also not recover from that.

I found a solution though, several people tried it, and it seemed to work. Heating the PS3 up with a hair dryer through the ventilation shafts for 15 minutes, then straight away cooling it down again for 20 minutes.

Tried, and it worked, it's running fine again, so I backed up some stuff, mainly savegames, because this is not really a permanent fix, it can last now for days, weeks, months to come, but probably it's somehow dead. If I get the YLOD again, I will have to look out for a new one, as I'm not gonna use the hair dryer method all the time.

I looked on eBay, and they sell used slim 120GB consoles with FW 3.55 for 180€. Might be an option, I still have hundreds of games to play on the PS3, so I really need a new one, if the old one completely dies. The slim ones also won't get the YLOD, because they are better cooled.

Kind a strange a error like that, but maybe the tracks on pcb got loose. Sometimes with overheating or vibration, tracks can "jump" or solder joint can broke a bit and somewhere over the motherboard you get a bad connection. Heating with a hair dryer can fix it, but, probably next time you play for a long period it could happen again.
If it's a faulty track, sometimes is visible, sometimes is quite difficult to see it. Next time, try to open the ps3 and try to look at the main board with a magnifying glass. If you spot it, and if it's a bad solder join or track you can easily fix it. But it could be something totally different. It it is a chip leg can be worst as they are difficult to fix. I try one time so solder one, and my iron solder end point is bigger then 3 or 4 legs together, making it very difficult to solder.

The YLOD is fixable but only with the right equipment and soldering/rework experience. There are people over on Amibay that can probably repair the PS3 for you for not too much money and it might be worth it because your early PS3 is much better than the later models. Does your still have PS2 compatibility? Because this is completely missing from later models.

The reason for the YLOD error is as you thought heat related, and your early PS3 has done really well to last this long. It is due to the heating up and cooling down as you use and then switch off the PS3. The solder used on more modern PCBs is lead free and prone to becoming stressed by the heat expansion and retraction and causes dry joints, where the solder cracks and tracks or chip legs get disconnected from the motherboard. To fix this the solder on the motherboard needs to be reflowed. The professional way is to use a proper solder station to reflow the solder. Someone with experience could probably remove the actual chips and resolder them correctly, but a common method (that sounds scary for many) is to strip the PS3 down to its motherboard, then stick that in the oven. This melts the solder and allows it to reflow and reconnect the broken dry joins.

It isn't a perminent forever fix thugh because people doing this still report the YLOD eventually coming back in 6+ months. So a new CFW setup PS3 is probably your best option in the long run.

BTW, are Sony still manufacturing PS3's? I was wondering if I should buy a spare if they are before they end production due to the PS4.

If you haven't played a classic game in years, it's never too late to start!

I bought my first PS3 in european launch date. Last year the YLOD visited me. I don't recommend to give money to fix it for less than 6 months. Yes, mine had PS/PS2 backward compatibility as well, but actually I never played any PS/PS2 game. So, I forced to buy the only available PS3 console, which right now is the Super Slim model.

The fu**ing thing is that your HD is locked, and unfortunately it cannot be read in another PS3, even if you find the exactly same model (FAT). Probably they want to sell PLUS subscriptions in order to have their Cloud service to save your savegames there.

I still have my launch PS3 as well. It should still be working, but the HD in it died a few years back and I haven't used it since. Wasn't the original HD in it, back when I got it I immediately switched the original 60Gb for a 200GB one. I wasn't sure that it was the HD that had died and since I didn't want to lose any saves I instead bought a new slim console which didn't cost that much anyway and tried moving the HD over there. Found out that it indeed was the HD that died though, so had lost everything. But from what Phantom is saying, it wouldn't have worked anyway? You can't migrate HDs between PS3s? That was news to me.

That's when I signed up for PS+ by the way, to prevent such a loss from happening again. No regrets though, PS+ is a great value and I definitely recommend it.

I have a 300GB HDD in my PS3, but there's only some games on it that didn't work at the time from external disk, and I don't have any DLC on it, so I think it's fine. Only stuff would be game installations, but the can be installed again, and also some of them are on the external HDD.

I got 75% of my savegames on a USB stick, some games don't let you copy them though, only in the cloud.